Background

Both Red Hat and Ansible customers have interest in support for managed application deployment and configuration through the Azure collection. Red Hat SREs and management teams could use this capability to automate testing and deployment of managed applications where the Azure GUI or CLI are required today. Similarly, customers have requested the capability where they may want isolated deployments of Ansible on Azure in different regions or subscriptions; those customers can use Terraform or the Azure CLI to deploy Ansible on Azure easily. Those customers should be able to use Ansible to deploy Ansible on Azure in as seamless a capacity as competing offerings.

Business Impact: Enables scalability when being able to deploy resources in different regions/subscriptions, ease deployment of managed applications both internally and externally to the BU and avoid extra management/confusion of the Azure CLI and ease development lifecycle when using Ansible.

Stories

As an Ansible on Clouds customer I can use Ansible playbooks to support the deployment and management of my Managed Applications so that I can design automation that doesn't require an experience where I have to build calls to the Azure CLI and maintain custom Execution Environments that provide the Azure CLI or REST API support that do operate with Managed Applications. This will allow me to move away from a Terraform-based solutions that do support Managed Applications when I need to have my infrastructure designed as code.

As the Ansible on Clouds project we can use the Azure Collection to create playbooks to deploy and manage the lifecycle of managed applications so that playbooks and automation can be written in native Ansible syntax as opposed to relying on calls to the Azure CLI or REST APIs in order to perform the action. This improvement will allow the project to decouple from the Azure CLI for many deployment requirements and remove an unnecessary abstraction.